But now, sitting in Maeve’s kitchen with the Fitzgerald report glowing on the phone screen, the Hightower attack and this assassination aligned like crosshairs on a scope. Both had been carried out by unknown operatives with professional-grade resources. Both had involved intelligence that exceeded anything the slayer network could have gathered independently. Both were funded or coordinated by someone who preferred to remain anonymous. Someone who sent cream-colored envelopes and wore overcoats too expensive for an Irish fishing village.
One anomaly was a coincidence. Two was suspicious. Three data points made a pattern.
The celebration continued around him. Thomas was describing what he’d do if he ever faced a dragon in combat, his gestures growing wilder with each glass of whiskey. Henry was quieter but no less fervent, already discussing potential next targets. Maeve watched them from the kitchen doorway with an expression Duff couldn’t read, though he thought he caught something sad in it.
The next morning, Cormac sent a message with additional intelligence about the Fitzgerald hit. The kills were clean and precise. Ambush-style, executed during what should’ve been a routine, heavily guarded journey. The attackers had known the Fitzgeralds’ travel route, their security protocols, their exact schedule.
Duff studied the details, and what he saw only tightened the knot in his stomach. It hadn’t been a lucky encounter or an opportunistic strike, but a planned execution. The level of intelligence required for this operation was extraordinary. Someone with inside knowledge of the Fitzgerald clan had provided the tactical information. No external surveillance, however sophisticated, could’ve produced this level of detail. This came from someone close to the Fitzgeralds, from someone who had dealings with the Fitzgeralds.
A dragon. The intelligence came from a dragon.
The thought wasn’t new. It had been circling since his father’s funeral, growing larger with each orbit, and Duff was running out of sky to push it into. Dragons providing intelligence about dragons. Dragons funding operations against dragons. Dragons using the slayer network—hisnetwork, his father’s legacy—as a weapon against their own kind.
If that was true, if their anonymous benefactor was a dragon using them as hired killers, then the sacred mission wasn’tsacred at all. It was mercenary work—contract killing dressed up in the language of holy purpose.
He shared none of these observations with Thomas and Henry. They were still riding the high, already planning, already dreaming of the next victory. Their certainty was pure and uncomplicated, exactly as Duff’s had been once upon a time. He envied them. He also feared for them.
Over the following weeks, three more members of the network went dark. Duff tried every channel, every backup protocol, every emergency contact his father had established. Nothing. They’d simply vanished, and a cold dread was settling into Duff’s bones that had nothing to do with the Scottish winter.
Cormac offered explanations that were reasonable on the surface. People moved on. Lost faith. Decided the fight wasn’t worth the risk. It happened. The cause was old and the enemy was invisible, and not everyone had the constitution to spend their life hunting shadows. All true, yet none of those explanations satisfied Duff.
He was sitting at the kitchen table late one evening, staring at a map on his laptop that had colored markers representing network members—too many of them now crossed out—when Maeve appeared with two mugs of tea and set one in front of him without asking.
“You’ll wear a hole through that screen with your eyes,” she said, settling into the chair across from him.
“I’m trying to make sense of it.”
“The vanishings?”
He looked up. Maeve’s face was calm, but her eyes—sharp and dark beneath a fringe of gray hair—held something he hadn’t expected. “You’ve noticed.”
“Hard not to.” She wrapped both hands around her mug, the steam curling between her fingers. “Padraig, I understood. The man could barely climb stairs. And Seána was always more of asympathizer than a soldier. But Liam? Aoife? Conn?” She shook her head slowly. “Conn took that oath with tears streaming down his face. You don’t walk away from something you wept over.”
Duff’s throat tightened. He’d been thinking the same thing, but hearing it from Maeve—steady, unshakable Maeve, who’d been running safe houses since before Duff was born—made it harder to dismiss. “Cormac says they lost faith.”
“Cormac says a lot of things.” The words were mild, but something underneath them was not. Maeve took a sip of tea, watching Duff over the rim. “Your father trusted Cormac completely. I never quite managed it.”
That startled him. “You never said anything.”
“Wasn’t my place. Ronan made his own choices about who to trust, and questioning them would’ve been questioning him.” She set her mug down. “But Ronan’s gone, and you’re not your father, Duff. You see things he didn’t. You always have.”
The ember pulsed behind his sternum. Duff wasn’t sure if it was warming him or warning him. “What things?”
“The money, for one.” Maeve’s voice dropped, though there was no one to overhear. Thomas and Henry had gone to bed an hour ago. “Those envelopes Cormac gets. Your father never questioned where they came from. I always wondered if he should have.”
“You think the money is dirty?”
“Money that arrives in cream-colored envelopes from men in expensive overcoats who refuse to give their names is money that comes with strings. Whether those strings are dirty or not depends on who’s holding the other end.” She paused. “And I think you’ve been wondering the same thing.”
He had. For four years, he’d been circling that question without letting himself land on it. Hearing Maeve voice it—calmly, without drama, like she was discussing the weather—somehow made it both more real and more manageable. He wasn’t alone in his doubt.
“There’s something else,” Duff said. He pulled up the Fitzgerald report and turned his screen so Maeve could read it. “The hit on the Fitzgerald royals. Professional job, inside intelligence, same anonymous source. And last year, the Hightower attack was done by men calling themselves dragon slayers, but I’d never heard of them.”
Maeve read the report slowly, her expression unchanging. When she finished, she folded her hands on the table. “That’s a pattern, love.”
“I know.”
“A pattern that looks a lot like someone’s been using us.”
